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How is this site doing this?

It shows a splash / promotion page yet you check the cache and it's the real homepage, they are doing this so they don't lose rankings but how are they redirecting users to that but Google is caching the real homepage?

3 Responses

I think that the web server checks the user agent of the requesting client and if its a web crawler like the google bot - shows the normal home page.Its its a normal browser user agent , like firefox - it will show the splash screen.

In theory this should be ok for SEO as google bot only sees the normal home page. But in practice I think its an accident waiting to happen.If google change the user agent string of their crawler bots - then they could be shown the splash screen. Perhaps there are other methods the search engines use to check things like this.

View the source code when on the splash page and you will see that their entire site is there, this is what a search bot is seeing. View in browser and this triggers a splash screen overlay - really, the full website is there, you just can't see it.

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